A year after the mission came to an end, the Japanese Hayabusa mission is officially certified by Guinness World Records as the first spacecraft to return to Earth carrying material from an asteroid.
The Japanese H-2 Transfer Vehicle Kounotori 2 launched on Saturday to deliver supplies to the space station. Its payload included a microgravity high school experiment.
As we look to our future amid the stars, solar sail technology gives us a compelling opportunity: the chance to hitch a ride on light.
After piggybacking on another satellite into orbit, the small cubesat is set to unfurl its sail in three days time.
Overcoming all the odds, it's been confirmed that the Japanese asteroid mission successfully returned samples of asteroid Itokawa to Earth.
Asteroid dust may have been found inside Hayabusa's sample return capsule, but how could this finding help us? For a start, it'll help us understand these potentially hazardous objects a little better.
If seeing is believing, this picture comes as sweet relief to a satellite operations team in Japan that has been overseeing the flight of an experimental solar sailing spacecraft.
A stunning video of Hayabusa's atmospheric re-entry has been released. The footage was taken by an airborne laboratory inside a converted DC-8 jetliner, showing the speeding capsule and spacecraft break-up.
On Sunday, JAXA's Hayabusa mission will return to Earth after a dramatic seven years in space. But will it contain those precious asteroid particles?
The kite-shaped sails on this unusual spacecraft are propelled by sunlight.
